Friday, 10 December 2010

Wal African Jazz Village

We played a good concert at “A la Votre” on Tuesday (which went well except for David’s “roadside salad” incident earlier on in the day, which obliged him to skip the encore and spend a good while visiting the toilets at the club and later at the hotel...) and we had a couple of days off to prepare our last concerts on Friday and Saturday.
We took the opportunity to meet up again with Mulatu Astatke who was kind enough to give us a guided tour of the “Wal African Jazz VIllage”, his music school which resembles more a performing arts centre, not completely finished but with enormous potential for the city’s cultural future.  He showed us through the various classrooms, rehearsal rooms, a huge amphitheater and a beautifully sounding old cinema which Mulatu claimed he’d convert into a fully functional concert venue.
We parted after the obligatory photo shoot of him and his car “Lucy”, and we were only too happy to hear that he had listened to our CD and that he had loved the music, that it was, in his opinion (of course) “beautiful fusion”!

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